'BIG ADVENTURE': GOOD ACTORS PLAYING BAD ACTORS LIFT THE CURTAIN ON PAIN

By Desmond Ryan

(Philadelphia Inquirer, October 4, 1995)

 

The great screen villains Alan Rickman has given us - Hans, the suave terrorist in Die Hard, and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood - pale before his latest incarnation of campy evil. In An Awfully Big Adventure, playing an actor in a distinctly down-market production of Peter Pan, he strides on stage as Captain Hook. Rickman's performance is so delightfully hammy he could hang it on the hook at the end of his arm.

An Awfully Big Adventure reunites Hugh Grant with director Mike Newell after their huge international success with Four Weddings and a Funeral. After Grant's awfully big misadventures in Hollywood, it's nice to see him back where he belongs and in the kind of part that invites earned laughter - in an episodic mix of drama and acid comedy - instead of the sitcom manipulations of Nine Months.

Rickman has a way of effortlessly stealing any film he's in, but Grant, as the director of a seedy Liverpool theater company, and newcomer Georgina Cates, as starstruck teenager Stella Bradshaw, keep things in balance in An Awfully Big Adventure. Adapted from Beryl Bainbridge's novel, Newell's film deals with fantasy and reality and play and pretense through the familiar metaphor of the theater. But while the boards on this stage may be well-worn, a fine cast, an apt setting, and some original perspectives yield a film that lifts the curtain on the pain the players can forget only when they are performing.

This is achieved by making Stella's the main point of view. Through her gradually lost innocence - a commodity that has little chance of surviving in a company of vain and catty actors - buried secrets and harsh truths emerge. One of the pleasures of An Awfully Big Adventure lies in watching very good actors play pretty bad ones. This repertory company where Stella gets her first job as a gofer is putting on a series of plays in postwar Liverpool. Devastated by German bombs and beset by shortages, Liverpudlians are eager for any escape - even the tacky productions put on by Meredith Potter (Grant) and his players.

Grant rejoices in the pretentious viciousness of Potter, the company taskmaster. Gathering his actors for the first rehearsal, he assures them that they are "the very best we could find" and then adds "for the money." His cast, an assortment of lushes, lechers, dreamers and failures, seems to accept the observation without demurring.

Rickman, a fallen matinee idol with a secret in his past and a glum future, arrives halfway tough the film. It's a serious misjudgment by screenwriter Charles Wood, since Rickman is the pivotal figure in what happens to Stella.

Wood is best known for the script of Help! and Newell makes the drabness of '50s Liverpool before the Beatles erupted on the scene a forceful presence in An Awfully Big Adventure. The shabbiness around Stella makes the theater extremely seductive.

Fans of Four Weddings should not try An Awfully Big Adventure in search of more of the same. This off-beat and sometimes consciously off-putting film is such a change of pace for Grant and Newell that it amounts to counterprogramming.

 

 

Originally on KelClancy's Page